As I rediscover the joys (or the ills) of vinyl, here’s Kai Schäfer incredible World Records series of photographs. I can’t stop wondering about the lighting setup, as the photos seem rendered rather than captured somehow. (via Wired.com)

I am truly sick of reading or watching stuff made by wannabe sophisticates acting as if they invented the wheel, when in fact are just repackaging and reframing stuff made not much long ago by a not-dissimilar sort of people. The materialization of abstract concepts is to be expected then, as plagiarized works are to be seen as new by the inclusion of these invisible new raw materials. In this context, Art English is just a tiresome, predictable symptom of the fact that art the ‘creative industries’ are all just about posing an attitude and about packaging irrelevancies in a way that conveys a feeling of being a (take your pick:) sophisticated / interesting / mysterious / fabulous person, and not about making art at all, not about communication at all, not about sharing and empathizing with other humans at all.

Not even about just showing something cool.

I feel more and more that, in the same way as all professional sports tend to become like Wrestling, so does Contemporary Art constantly tends to become Advertising (of itself and of the artist) and a sad affirmation of exclusivity. Not that this is, mind you, a new critique, people have been making the same sort of point since before Pop Art opened the floodgates of artistic capitalism. And therein, perhaps, lies the root problem. Just say no!

Besides being an interesting photography project, I find this really useful. One of the perils of color correction work is that after a while one starts to question how certain colors (for instance: skin) are supposed to look like. Not only your sight adapts to certain hues (blue-ish, orange-ish, etc.) until they seem neutral, but after a while you find yourself in a position similar to someone who repeats the same familiar word out loud until it seems strange and meaningless. So, no matter how good and calibrated your monitor is, objective electronic assistance is very much needed (if available, the vectorscope function is your best friend), and having a list of skin tones at hand can help — not forgetting one should always ask “what color is this skin under this light?”, a question that some decline to answer… (via Designboom)